Hours before a black student union-led protest against police brutality was scheduled to begin at the UC Berkeley last weekend, effigies of black lynching victims were found hanging on campus.

The three cardboard effigies weren’t designed to be a secret. They were hung on Sather Gate and near the Campanile.

Nor are the victims a secret. Lynching is an act of domestic terrorism, designed to keep African Americans “in their place” of poverty and degradation. So when it was commonly done in this country, the bodies of the victims were paraded around: Laura Nelson, for example, one of the cardboard corpses, was a real-life Oklahoma farmer who was hanged from a bridge across the North Canadian river in front of 58 white spectators in 1911. Her gruesome death was photographed by George Henry Farnum, turned into postcards and sent through the U.S. mail.

The only secret in the Berkeley incident is who hung the effigies. The group that has claimed responsibility won’t tell us who they are.

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I realized that what troubles me isn’t the effigies, it’s the anonymity. Part of what people all around the country have been protesting for the past weeks is the idea that black people aren’t visible as individuals in society — a condition that makes them economically and socially disposable.

The protests have been about demanding personhood for black Americans, not obscurity. Obscurity’s benefits usually flow to those who are already entitled. This isn’t news to anyone who’s ever looked at an Internet comment section or contemplated the Ku Klux Klan.

Sadly, it seems that there are a few people who need to learn this all over again. The discovery of the effigies was deeply upsetting to many people, including many of the ones who have been trying to argue that #BlackLivesMatter. UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks released a statement saying that “the imagery was deeply disturbing,” and “the impact that it has had on our campus community is undeniable.”

The response from the anonymous group? They say it’s art.

“We are a collective of queer and POC [people of color] artists responsible for the images of historical lynchings posted to several locations in Berkeley and Oakland,” reads the statement they hung up on a campus bulletin board. They intended the images not “as an act of racism” but as “the confrontation of historical context.”

Well, then.

There’s a valuable tradition in African American art of reappropriating traumatic words and horrific imagery. Well-known artists like Kara Walker and Pat Ward Williams have used images of lynching in their work; the rap group Public Enemy used a photograph of a lynching for the cover of one of their singles in 1992.

Some academics and observers at UC Berkeley believe that this anonymous group is keeping up that tradition. I don’t particularly believe that these cardboard cutouts contain the aesthetics that would allow them to rise to the level of art, but others may disagree.

Also, reappropriation works only if the user is actually part of the group that’s been terrorized. All of the artists I named above pulled these terrible events out of the shadows, allowed themselves to be named, and dealt with whatever fallout came their way, because that’s the price of reclaiming history and demanding personhood.

The Berkeley group is choosing to remain anonymous. We have no idea what they’re bringing out of the shadows at all.

And I’m not encouraged by what they’ve said in their statement.

“We are a collective of queer and POC artists.”

Sexuality has nothing to do with lynching, so claiming a queer identity isn’t relevant except inasmuch as this group hopes it might provide some protection against a lack-of-empathy accusation.

“POC” is an elastic term. It could mean a specific group, or it could mean that someone’s trying to claim, say, a phantom American Indian ancestor.

I’m skeptical that it means “African American” because of another sentence in their statement: “We apologize solely and profusely to black Americans who felt further attacked by this work. We are sorry — your pain is ours — our families’, our history’s.”

They’re apologizing “to” black Americans — marking them as a specific group that exists outside of themselves.

I could be wrong, of course. Maybe this group really is pulling off a radical act of subversion, a serious indictment of the way history continues in the present. Maybe they really are creating some thoughtful art, instead of a nasty prank.

But if I am wrong, at least I’m willing to be wrong in public. What this group doesn’t seem to realize is that they have to be willing to take that chance, too. That’s the price of claiming personhood for those who have been made invisible.